


Kaleidoscope

by inlovewithnight



Category: Kings
Genre: Gen, Preseries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:35:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Kaleidoscope

The top spins madly on its string, scattering brightly-colored rays of light across the walls of the room. Michelle laughs, and the King pulls the string again, making it spin faster, until watching it leaves her dizzy.

She rests her head on his knee, still laughing, and his hand settles on her shoulder. This is home; this is warmth and safety and love, this is what it is to be the daughter of the King chosen by God.

She sits up again and reaches for the top, running her fingers over the bright surface. "Jack," she says, "come see."

"Jack needs to finish his schoolwork," the King says. Michelle looks across the nursery, to where Jack is sitting at a table with his notes and books. His tutor, a tall young man with dark eyes who always looks frightened, is watching the prince underline passages on a sheet of paper. Really, Michelle thinks, he's watching Jack's hands move across the page.

"Jack always has more work to do than me," she says, looking up at her father again.

"Jack is going to be a warrior," Silas says, "and then someday, he is going to be king."

Jack's mouth twists into a smile, but he doesn't look up.

"What am I going to be?" Michelle asks.

The King touches her hair, her brow, her lips. "You are going to be good."  
**  
Jack and Michelle think there was a plan, before they were born, that the King would mold the prince and the Queen would groom the princess, and through each of their focused efforts would come perfect royal dolls, preserving legacy, country, and pride without ever causing a single moment of trouble.

It didn't work that way, of course. Not only the part about not causing trouble, but the beginning, where Silas and Rose would divide up the parenting and each produce a work of filial art. Jack was made by his tutors, his coaches, and when he was old enough to attend classes at the Academy, his comrades.

Michelle took her cues from Thomasina, and from her books, and just from _watching_. People came together and apart in patterns, throwing off sparks and vapors. There was an underlying order, if you watched, and the ones with the power could make that order better or worse, uglier or more pleasing to the eye.

The King and Queen were not neglectful, nor cruel; Jack and Michelle never doubted that they were loved, nor forgot that their parents were close by them always. But Silas and Rose quickly proved to be less than interested in shaping their children than in stating expectations and assuming they would be met, as they were in everything else.

And in outline, they _were_. Jack was a soldier. Michelle was good.

It was only in the details that there were twists and turns.  
**  
She lies for him from the first frantic, stolen kiss she sees, on a winter afternoon in the pale half-light in the hall outside the sitting room that replaced the nursery. She's looking for a book she dropped, her mind half a world away, and she almost misses them, Jack and their dancing teacher, half-hidden by the curtains the Queen will order stripped down six months later.

The older the Benjamin children become, the thinner the layers of veiling become, the more light is let in, the fewer secrets are permitted within the house. Silas and Rose will lie to the world for a thousand years to protect their children, but they themselves _will_ know everything there is to know.

Michelle is still young enough to feel this without resenting it, that first day she sees her brother kissing the dancer. And yet something about the sight--the flush of Jack's skin, the curve of Darron's throat, the way their fingers hesitate to leave one another--whispers that this doesn't belong to their parents, or shouldn't. This is Jack's, and she should help him keep it.

Six months later the curtains come down, and more servants are added to daily routines that don't at all need them. More eyes for fewer hiding places. Jack is given more classes at the military academy, under the watchful eyes of the King's generals, and Darron is replaced by Edina.

It's another year after that before Michelle realizes that those things are all connected, that her silence and her resolutions aren't worth a damn against the royal will to know. But Jack keeps fighting to have what he wants, and Michelle keeps lying, because it's at once the least and the most that either them can do.  
**  
They know each other less and less as time passes--he is being made into what the King will have him be, soldier and heir, while she is trying to stretch the edges of being good into _doing_ good while keeping the schedule the Queen expects and the press prefers.

He thinks she's silly and shallow and useless. She thinks he's becoming cruel and cold, and that there's a streak of jealousy in him that could grow fast and ugly without anything to check it. Neither of them is very good at hiding what they think from the other--no secrets within the family, after all, even though that's where they're needed most.

Still, they grew up together in the harsh light of scrutiny, royal hothouse flowers under tinted glass with the world peering through. Nothing can change that, or snap the spiderweb strands of time and memory that tie them together. Shared glances at state dinners, jokes whispered too softly for the staff to hear, silent mutual understanding of the King's sulks and rages, the Queen's grim steely moods; whatever happens, they have those between them.

Enough strands of spider-silk, twisted together, are as strong as iron.  
**  
The night before he ships out to the front, they have dinner as a family. The King drinks too much and tells old stories, getting the names and places wrong. The Queen fires everyone in the kitchen over the crime of a single wilted lettuce leaf. Michelle hardly eats. Jack hardly keeps from laughing. Everyone can tell, and that makes it all worse.

When their parents go to bed, Michelle lingers for a moment in the sitting room, watching him sit on the couch. Silence stretches on too long, and Jack glances up from a bored study of his own hands.

"What's wrong?" he asks. She shakes her head, and he sighs, then nods and touches the cushion next to him. "Michelle."

She sits, but they don't talk, don't touch. The servants hover just out of sight, waiting to turn off the lights, occasionally whispering in tones just barely too low to hear.

"Past our bedtime," Jack mutters, a dry imitation of Rose in his tone. "What terrible children."

Michelle laughs a little, brushing her fingers over his knee. "Be careful."

He looks down at her hand and covers it with his own, lacing their fingers together lightly. "Be good."


End file.
